This year I had the honor of presenting at Forcelandia again. Forcelandia is one of my favorite user led conferences, both because of it’s wealth of technical content and because, living in Seattle, it’s our closest PNW Conference. Big Shout out to Slalom for being a Platinum Sponsor this year! And of course to all the amazing folks that managed to put this great event together.

If you’re a Developer, you’re probably fairly familiar with your org’s Governor Limits (CPU Time, SOQL queries, DML operations). But if you’re an Admineloper or Business Analyst, excited to design automation with new tools like process builder and visual flow, you might not be taking these limits into account, and subsequently hitting errors.

This last week I had the immense pleasure of presenting on this topic at Forcelandia. My session provided an overview of Governor Limits, how they pertain to Process Builder and Flow, and tips for avoiding hitting these limits with your clicks-not-code automation.

Salesforce’s Visual Workflow and Process Builder are incredibly powerful tools but can be very difficult to troubleshoot. I struggled to make these tools effective until I was able to get a glimpse of what was happening inside. Salesforce has some suggestions for how to troubleshoot failing flows but often these tools provide incomplete answers. Particularly for auto launched flows, these techniques are often insufficient.

If you work on the clicks side of the force and you haven’t heard of Custom Settings and the cool things you can do with them using declarative functionality then this is the blog post for you! There are also many other great blog posts for you out there and a few Dreamforce sessions as well. Why should you keep reading this particular blog post and not crawl off down the internet rabbit hole I just dug for you? Because I’m going to explain what Custom Settings are and then document three examples of how you can use them with clicks not code, but more importantly, my examples are kind of funny… I hope.

What are Custom Settings?

Custom Settings, like Custom Objects., have custom fields that allow you to create records that contain data. However, unlike Custom Objects, Custom Settings can be accessed in any formula, workflow rule, and process builder organization-wide. Custom Settings are indeed settings for your org or application!

Here’s an example of a “simple” flow that uses a Decision element. You don’t need to use flow to achieve the results – you could entirely stick to Process Builder. This flow is for educational purposes only.

Here’s the sitch: I want an automatic email to my customer when we quote a specific product. For example, “Dear Darnell McCustomer, for a limited time only, you can purchase the EDGE widget for $150!”

Caveat: I want this to be in an HTML template, not a Visualforce email, based on the Quote object. I can’t reach the price on the Quote Line Item from Quote in this format.